A review of last night's Pub Quiz....

I have no interest in filling the pages of this blog with the results of playing Pub Quiz, something I do once or twice a week.  But I have come to the conclusion that it might be worthwhile to review the various types of quizzes and locations that offer them.  Last night I went to Finn McCool's in Santa Monica for their Monday night quiz.

Now Finn McCool's is a cool place (pun intended).  It's an Irish pub that was imported, brick by brick, from Ireland.  The owner also imported a bunch of nice Irish folk to be the staff of servers, bartenders and the like.  So the accents are authentic, not faked by aspiring actors.  Old bad joke.  Two people meet in L.A.  One asks "so what do you do for a living?"  The second says "I'm an actor."  The first replies "Really?  At what restaurant?"

The food is first rate Irish fare and the worst part of going there is parking is not easy.  All the spaces along Main Street are metered, and limited to one or two hours until 10 p.m. and the public parking lot behind the alley behind the place runs $1 per hour or so.  Not too bad, but that lot usually gets crowded.

The quizzes at Finn McCool's are run by a company called Dreambuilders.  Dave, who put it together is in New Orleans these days, or so I here.  Dreambuilders has trivia at pubs and bars all over L.A., and once a year they hold a tournament for a month and take all of the top 3 finishers at each of their locations to one spot to have a great big finale.  That finale is this coming Sunday.  I played in that finale a couple of times a few years ago and it is a lot of fun.

Their format is simple.  4 rounds of 5 questions.  You bid on the first four questions, based on your comfort level with the question.  Rounds 1 and 2, the bidding is 1, 3, 5 and 7 points, using each value once.  Rounds 2 and 4, the bidding goes up to 2, 4, 6 and 8 points, again using each value just once.

The last question of each round is a bonus question.  Rounds 1 and 3, the bonus is a question with four answers.  2 points for each of the 4 correct answers in Round 1, 5 points for each of the 4 correct answers in Round 3.  If you put down more than 4 answers, they will take the first four, right or wrong, so it is best to take only 4 guesses.

In Rounds 2 and 4, the bonus involves a bid.  Round 2, you can bid from 2 to 10, even numbers only, and if you get it right, you get that many points.  If you get it wrong, you lose half of your bid.  Round 4, the bidding is from 2 to 20, with the same rules.

So, there are 24 points possible in Round 1, 26 in Round 2, 40 in Rounds 3 and 4, for a total possible score of 130 points.

All of my "teammates" were otherwise occupied last night, so I played solo and managed to scrape up a score of 99 (I lost 4 points on the final bonus), which was good enough to win.  The prize was a $30 gift certificate to be used on a future visit to Finn McCool's.  So I guess I'll be going back at least once, to use my prize.